Quantization Meets Spikes: Nearly Lossless Conversion at the First Timestep via Polarity Multi-Spike Mapping

Abstract

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer advantages in computational efficiency via event-driven computing, compared to traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). While direct training methods tackle the challenge of non-differentiable activation mechanisms in SNNs, they often suffer from high computational and energy costs during training. As a result, ANN-to-SNN conversion approach remains a valuable and practical alternative. These conversion-based methods aim to leverage the discrete output produced by the quantization layer to obtain SNNs with low latency. Although the theoretical minimum latency is one timestep, existing conversion methods have struggled to realize such ultra-low latency without accuracy loss. Moreover, current quantization approaches often discard negative-value information following batch normalization and are highly sensitive to the hyperparameter configuration, leading to degraded performance. In this work, we, for the first time, analyze the information loss introduced by quantization layers through the lens of information entropy. Building on our analysis, we introduce polarity multi-spike mapping (PMSM) framework and a hyperparameter initialization strategy tailored for the quantization layer. Our method achieves nearly lossless ANN-to-SNN conversion at the extremity, i.e., the first timestep, while also leveraging the temporal dynamics of SNNs across multiple timesteps to maintain stable performance on complex tasks. Extensive experiments on six image and neuromorphic datasets consistently demonstrate that PMSM achieves nearly lossless accuracy at the first timestep. Remarkably, despite operating under ultra-low-latency constraints, PMSM surpasses state-of-the-art direct training methods on multiple benchmarks.